The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Current projections indicate that some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services will be installed in a majority of new American cars in the near future. These services may be accessed through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics service call centers, in-vehicle compact disk (CD) or digital video display (DVD) media, web portals, and voice-enabled phone portals provide various types of location services, including driving directions, stolen vehicle tracking, traffic information, weather reports, restaurant guides, ski reports, road condition information, accident updates, street routing, landmark guides, and business finders.
The speech recognition system within a telematics system operates on speech spoken from inside a vehicle, often with a changing ambient environment. When the speech recognition system is triggered to initiate human-to-human communication or human-to-machine communication over an embedded or in-vehicle phone an application in the speech recognition system will trigger the hands-free system in the phone. The hands-free system has a noise reduction algorithm to provide capability to reduce ambient noise. In some cases the spoken word is received at the microphone along with ambient noise. Some noise suppression technologies use the received ambient noise to form an ambient noise parameter. The formed ambient noise parameter is used to modify the received signal and ambient noise input in a hands-free algorithm within the speech recognition system.
There are various conditions that will change the ambient noise level within a vehicle. These conditions include the speed of the vehicle, the level of the fan to control the internal environment of the vehicle, audio-devices in the vehicle, beeps and chimes related to turn signaling and seatbelt, the weather in which the vehicle is traveling, and the type of road the vehicle is on and the condition of the road. For example, a dry highway has a different noise level within a vehicle than a wet highway or a muddy dirt road. If a user of a telematics system is speaking to a hands-free system while the background noise is changing, the hands-free algorithm needs to adapt as efficiently as possible to remove the various changing ambient noises. This helps the person listening to the phone at the other end of the communication system channel to recognize the spoken words over the changing ambient noise. If the phone call is directed to a machine, for example, in a telematics-unit access system at a call center, the speech recognition system of the machine will recognize the words.
It is desirable to tune a hands-free system to the changing vehicular environmental conditions based on feedback other than the received ambient signal. It is desirable to add data, which is based on the physical environment in which the vehicle is being driven and the physical environment inside the vehicle passenger compartment and the physical environment of the vehicle engine to the noise received along with the spoken words.